Defining Business Processes – How a BizTalk Orchestration Makes Defining Process Logic Easy

Communication between different systems is essential to automating business processes, which is the core problem BizTalk services help address. Many applications require a way to define and execute process logic, which is what BizTalk orchestrations help do.

It’s entirely possible to create an automated process in a common language like C# or Visual Basic – writing, maintaining and managing complex business processes can be very time consuming and challenging however.

BizTalk orchestrations create business processes graphically

Not only is it less time consuming to create a business process graphically using BizTalk orchestrations, they’re easier to understand, explain and change.

Fundamentally speaking, a business process is a set of actions that works together to meet a useful business need…examples include a purchase order approval process, work order approval or even inventory control.

Creating an automated business process requires BizTalk developers and business people to work together in order for it to be successful. To make this as easy as possible, BizTalk service provides a software tool for each.

BizTalk developers use an add-on tool that runs in Visual Studio. But only software programmers are able to understand and use this program – therefore, an add-on to Visio provides business people with an easy tool to collaborate with their IT peers.

BizTalk Orchestration Designer allows a developer to define actions by connecting “shapes” in a logical way

To put it simply, a BizTalk orchestration process receives a message from a send adapter and a decision is made based on the message’s content – one of two paths are executed as a result of that decision.

See examples of the different “shapes” here.

Once a developer creates an orchestration, the group of shapes and their relationship to one another is converted into a standard .NET assembly.

SOAP based web services have become a more significant consideration for BizTalk developers in recent times…to access external web services, the BizTalk server includes a WCF Service Consuming Wizard that allows developers to create orchestrations that use web-based services via SOAP or any other WCF mechanism. The WCF Service Publishing wizard helps a developer easily expose one or more of an orchestration’s operations as WCF services.

See a basic example of what an orchestration looks like by clicking here.

Bookmark and check back with the IT knowledge center at ITstaffing-e.org soon for more articles on the BizTalk orchestration process and the Business Rule Engine, a tool that makes it easier to define and change business rules for a significant subset of processes.